THE IE.C.'S WHIFF OF HOLLYWOOD call that Jonathan had happened to overhear. More Important, they an- nounced that all those involved, with the exception of Ursitti, had agreed to coöperate and answer fully the S.E.C.'s questions in the upcoming depositions. In those sessions, beginning in late June and continuing into September, Geist and Brotbacker finally learned just what had happened. ^s long as Jonathan was at his par- .L\.. ents' house that September weekend of 1990, h.e had managed to keep quiet about the news of the im- pending Matsushita-MCA deal. But, despite his father's admonition, he had apparently been bursting to tell some- one. Jonathan later described his excite- ment about the news: "My relation- ship to that company, as a result of my father being there for over thirty years, was such that I guess I knew that ultimately one day something big was going to happen. And I had a dis- tinct feeling, just over the little bit that I heard . . . that something was re- ally happening now, and that maybe this was the real thing, or something. And it was all something that, in my own mind, got me very excited. . . . I had some MCA stock that was given to me when I was a little boy that- I mean, obviously, that excited me also. . . . It was just building inside me, the excitement." On Sunday afternoon, Jonathan left the beach house to take his daughter to the amusement park on the Santa Monica pier. First, he called Maria on his cellular phone, and then, while Thea was on the merry-go-round, he called her again, from a pay phone on the pier. Fogel described the events, at his sec- ond deposition, as follows: "I was at home with Maria Sheinberg. . . . At about 4 P.M., Jon Sheinberg called my home and spoke with Maria. He said something exciting was going on with the company. 1 don't think he said MCA-or he may have and he couldn't talk about it on that phone-and he was going to call back in a few minutes from another telephone. I believe about ten minutes later Jon called back and spoke to Maria and told her-and 1 think I was on the phone also; I don't remember. . . . MCA was going to be bought by a Japanese company in the next two days and he was very excIted n " 65 c . "Life is too short for soft porn." . and he was just excited and nervous and that we should talk about it some more and then 1 should buy some stock. It would be a good thing for me to go buy k " some stoc . When Maria and Barry picked up Thea that evening, they joined Jonathan and Susan at his home, in Venice Beach, to refine their strategy. For ob- vious reasons, Jonathan and Fogel weren't close friends, but they knew each other reasonably well. As boys, they had played on the same Little League team in Beverly Hills, and on Halloween, 1989, several months after Fogel started dating Maria, they had all had dinner together and had taken Thea trick-or-treating. En route to Jonathan's that evening, Fogel called his mother from his car phone to borrow money; he says he didn't tell her what the money was for. At about eight- thirty, he and Maria and their dog . joined Jonathan, Susan, Thea, and therr dog. The dogs promptly had a set-to, running around and barking. Maria and Susan came in and out of the conversa- tion, sometimes leaving to play with Thea or, in Susan's case, to study for a test she had to take the next day in one of her fashion classes. If any of the par- ticipants felt that there was anything in- congruous about a husband and wife and their lovers sitting down to plot in- sider trading, no one mentioned it, nor have any of them mentioned it since While Susan has tried to place the onus on Maria ("1 remember her being the instigator," she testified later), all the participants' accounts of the evening pretty much agree with Fogel's. "1 sat in the living room . . . and we talked about the MCA deal," Fogel re- called "And Jon told me that it was go- ing to get bought by, I think it's Matsushita, and it was going to happen